Planning Your Way to A Dream

To many people, the path to a dream feels very nebulous. Because so much of our emotions are tied to our ambition, we often treat it as we might an impulse and just sort of "go with the flow." While this is all fine and dandy, we suggest imposing some order upon your path, so that you might find your way a little quicker.

Many of us want to quit our jobs, live off our art, travel, etc. But how many of us have a concrete plan in place? Banks won't give out loans to small businesses without a business plan, as it's a risky investment. Due to the way our world works you need to start thinking about the concrete steps you need to take to get your art off the ground. Whether or not you want to be a non-profit or a huge corporation isn't the issue - if you want to be successful as quickly as possible, then you have to start talking a little business.

Let's look at a fictional person, and let's call this artist Sabrina. She wants to live off the sales of her paintings. Since she hasn't sold anything yet, she's looking into the options of selling prints of her work to make them more affordable. She also works 6 days a week at her minimum wage retail gig (which she absolutely hates) to survive.

Now, prior to getting a plan in place, Sabrina has been printing prints a few at a time at the local copy place whenever someone asks her for one. She has an Etsy shop, but doesn't update very often. She's been putting off creating a website, as the technical aspect of it scares her and she doesn't have the money to hire a web designer. So how is she going to change her life around where she can escape the retail job and just paint all the time?

Sabrina need to put a plan into place.

The first step in Sabrina's plan is to figure out her living expenses, and how much money she really needs to survive. She needs to figure out the bare minimum (food, shelter, clothing, student loan bills, etc.) that she needs per month to make it through. She also needs to figure out her ideal income (where she gets to go out to eat, hit the bar with friends, watch a movie here and there, etc.). She needs to figure out her budget because that's how much money she's going to need to make off her art.

The second step is to do the cold hard math. Say Sabrina's target income (where she'd feel comfortable completely leaving her job) is $2500 a month. Now, if she sells her originals, which take her three full days to paint, she thinks she can reasonably sell them for $600. She currently sells her prints at a profit of $8 per print. Because she works all the time, she doesn't get three full days to work at something, so she prioritizes it and works on it a bit each day, even though she's exhausted after work. So let's say the painting takes a week to finish, so she can make four paintings per month. How many paintings does Sabrina have to sell to make it by each month?

If Sabrina sells four paintings a month will make $2400, but if that's through a gallery, she'll only take home $1200 due to the 50% cut most galleries take. She's not sure if she can sell two paintings a month even with mad hustle, but she thinks she can sell one. So that's $300 through her friendly local gallery. That means, she has to come up with $2200 a month through print sales. Which means, at $8 profit each, she has to print, ship, and sell 275 prints per month (or about 69 prints per week, or about 10 prints per day).

Sabrina needs to evaluate whether or not she thinks this is possible, and if not, then she needs to re-evaluate her marketing, her pricing, her sourcing, or all three. She could also re-evaluate whether or not she's willing to make less before she quits her job, and where she can cut corners in her budget if need be.

You see, maybe Sabrina can sell her prints for more, so she has to sell fewer of them. Or perhaps her art translates well into greeting cards and she should look into licensing and wholesales. Maybe her art has an appeal to interior designers, and she could sell her originals for more. If her job is especially soul-sucking, maybe she'd be willing to give up her book-buying habit and instead visiting the library more, or maybe she doesn't really need that phone upgrade. Perhaps she thinks she just needs a better, strategic marketing plan.

Whatever it is, Sabrina needs to face the scary unknown of what she has to do to succeed. Most of the time it's a lot easier to bury your head in the sand and wonder "Why haven't I made it yet?" but it's important to really face the reality that you need to think of art like a business - with a budget, a marketing plan, and a well-thought out course of action. Then, which is a post into itself, comes the real challenge - putting it all into action.

Labels: Paralyzing or Helpful?

Her name is actually Rachel.

Imagine you're at an art show. Or imagine you're at Japantown, or at the supermarket, or at a bookstore, or an art supply store (because honestly that's likely the only places you'll ever find us). Now imagine that we walk up to you and ask you "what do you do?"

What you're most likely to do, especially if you've never met us in person, is to say "Oh, I'm a ______," where that blank is filled in with your job title. Likely, you're probably going to add in who you work for as well if it's a well-known large company. We very often attribute the question of "what do you do?" to mean "what is your job and what company do you work for?"

For us, that's just another conversation point, but for most people, it's a significant indicator of status. If you're a "CEO at a Fortune 500 company," that (most of society thinks) also means you're important, wealthy, competent, and pretty amazing. Society has taught us to create labels for ourselves and what we do, and the media and our own experiences have influenced what we believe about these labels.

The truth of the matter is that we are and are not what labels make us out to be, and that's why they are so powerful and dangerous at the same time. When we allow others to label us and box us in with their own preconceived notions of what go along with those labels, we begin to believe it and get trapped. We start believing that we're talentless, or poor, or we can also start believing that we're talented, competent, and awesome.

If you work or have worked in the (usually) unglamorous service sector like we have, you'll know that because of your job, people won't take you seriously. It's not seen as a "real job" or a "career," and it can totally make you feel like crap. Monkey will admit that when people who he went to school with would come in to his work, he'd feel a little bit embarrassed that he was still doing retail work while they were driving BMWs and were surgeons and lawyers and researchers and project managers, and all the other job titles that society thinks are super awesome and valuable. However, you can let the labels change you, or you can change the labels. Keep reading and we'll show you how.

In reality, there are probably three things you can do. You can let the label define who you are (don't do it!), you can embrace the labels given to you (easier if it's something you like), or you can change the labels. Because you're awesome, we already know you're not going to let the label define who you are. Even if you've done that in the past, since you're reading this, you now are more educated than you were before, so stop and scratch that option off.

You have two things you can do. You can embrace the labels given or you can change the labels. Let's cover option one: Embracing the labels.

If you're going to embrace the labels given to you, they had better be one that you actually enjoy. Say you're a staff art director at Wizards of the Coast, massive publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: the Gathering, and basically all the geek-tastic, drool-inducing things Monkey loves. You really enjoy your job, and are happy with your life. So what should you do? Hang out with your tribe. When you're with more people who identify as you do, you will reinforce the value of your label.

If this is you, awesome. Continue on and be proud of your label, but stick with us. You might want to do the following exercise anyway to figure out how you can make yourself even more awesome and happy.

Chances are, if you're reading this, you're not 100% happy with the label given to you. Maybe you're a high-salary CEO but you hate your job. Maybe you'd rather be known as an award-winning writer. Maybe you're a barista but would rather be a novelist. Maybe you're a staff art director at Wizards but would rather be a professional athlete or a biologist for the government. Whatever it is, if you're unhappy with the labels given to you, then it's time to change them.

Really, if you know us, any of our magical one-step things is usually a lot more involved than it seems, but here's the single-step method of changing your labels:

Step 1. Give yourself a specific job title that sounds super legit and cool. "Custodian" seems pretty boring compared to "Director of Groundskeeping and Improvements." "Blogger," doesn't quite have the ring of "Weekly columnist for an online publication." Throw this stuff down at parties and people will think you're pretty awesome.

Alternate Step 1. If your job has nothing to do with what you really want to be doing, then just say what you want to be doing, not what you are. We're not telling people to lie and say you're the CEO of Chronicle Books, but you can be the CEO of your own company. Maybe you hold down a retail job or work at a restaurant to pay the bills, but you can still be the owner of a small business at the same time. We're co-founders and owners of Monkey + Seal, an online apparel and design company that specializes in illustrations and screen-printed neckties, and we were all of that even when we both held down retail jobs. You can be the owner of Company XYZ, that specializes in your dream job.

That's it. Yes, we know that you also have to do the work of making a website or some business cards even, or getting a business license, but if you don't start writing your own labels and your own scripts, you'll always be stuck letting other people tell you who you are.

In Eiichiro Oda's manga and anime One Piece (we really need to write a book called "Everything I need to know in life I learned from One Piece), the main protagonist, Monkey D. Luffy constantly introduces himself in this way. "My name is Luffy. I'm going to be the Pirate King." In the world of One Piece, the pirate king is almost a mythical status, one that no one in the past 22 years has achieved. It's a pretty unbelievable thing to say, like claiming to be the best painter in the world, or to be the best writer on the planet, but the way Luffy says it, he damn well believes it, and his strength and determination soon makes believers about everyone he meets.

The point of the One Piece reference is that it is a perfect example of someone taking labels and using it to their advantage. Luffy's belief in his future is so strong that he convinces everyone around him that he really will, despite all initial impressions, end up as the greatest pirate in the world. This determination gathers a crew of equally-determined individuals who together will realize their dreams as one.

When you are writing your next "About" page, or writing your first one, think about who you are and who you want to be. Claim your dreams and your labels proudly and let them become self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you are ready to grab your life and chase your dreams, tell us who you are. Post a comment and say hello. By making a public declaration, you're going to be one step closer to realizing your potential. Yes, it's scary, but if you let fear rule your life, you'll never get anywhere. So we encourage you to do it here and leave a comment introducing yourself, with all the labels you choose, to the world. It's your life, and it's your choice, but if you want to be that person we know you can be, take the first action and step into your new identity.

Hacking Your Own Timeline

For everyone out there who found this because they thought they were going to hack their facebook timeline, many apologies. Today, what we want to talk about is hacking your own personal timeline..you know, as in your actual life outside of the digital madness that is facebook.

You see, many of us, artists especially, have this imaginary timeline in our heads. Lots of it are socialized stuff that we grew up or had put in place by our parents or relatives. These are things like "getting married by 30," or "retired exactly at 65," or "graduate college by 22." Stuff like that. By indirect (and sometimes direct) messages, we've trained our brain to have these specific landmarks in time where certain things need to be achieved. However, we never stop to ask ourselves if these markers are really valid or even realistic.

While Monkey + Seal always encourages people living their dreams, dreams also need to be tempered by reality. If your dream is to be a world-class photographer, chances are you won't have the opportunity to really develop your skills if you're a freshman in art school. Now this is not to say that schooling is necessary, because it isn't, but the point is that if you are just starting off in pursuing your dream, your dream isn't going to come true on day 1, or even day 600.

When we set goals with timelines, we have to make sure that we temper our sometimes crazy-high expectations of ourselves with what is humanly possible. Going back to the 10,000 hour rule - if you want to be an amazing painter, you seriously need to log in thousands and thousands of hours painting. Assume that you have just started painting and your goal is to be a famous fantasy book cover illustrator, do you really think it's realistic that you can achieve your goal in a single year? It is possible (as we think anything is possible), but is it realistic? Say that you only need maybe 5000 hours to get your first illustration gig - that's still about two and a half years, assuming that you're painting 40 hours a week. Bump that up to an amazing 80 hours of painting a week, for 52 weeks out of the year, and then you're still at over a year. Is painting 80 hours a week - more than 11 hours a day - realistic for you? For more than a year?

We live in an age where we want everything now. With downloadable music and movies and TV, we don't need to wait to drive to the video store or to wait for shipping. We're conditioned to want everything now. We want to be millionaires today, to be successful today, to be famous today. We want our business to be profitable yesterday, to be scheduled for talk shows a week ago, and to be invited to conferences as a special guest a month ago. These things take time, and in order for us to be successfully sustainable, we need to set realistic timelines for ourselves.

So how do we do this?

Step 1: Figure out how much work, on average, you'll need to put in to your goal.

Take the time to write out your goal. How far away from it are you? This first step is extremely, extremely important. How many hours do you need to put in per week? Be honest with yourself. If you want that novel on the bestseller's list, how many hours does it take you to write 500 words? Multiply that by 80 and you'll have the amount of time you'll need to produce a 40,000 word novel. Now, how much time will it take you to edit that much writing? How many revisions do you think you'll need? Research publishing companies. What's the average time between an acceptance of a novel and the books hitting the shelves? Add all this together, and you will figure out how much time you'll need.

Step 2: Double that number.

We told you to be honest, and our bet is that you probably underestimated the time needed. Even if you don't factor in procrastination time, artist's block, and life emergencies or events, you also need to take into account sustainability. You're probably betting on some crazy, over-productive work schedule along with what it takes you to produce a small amount of work. However, as your probably know, larger scale projects usually just take way longer than you could imagine. Writing 10,000 words or painting 5 new portfolio pieces is very, very different from writing 40,000 words or painting 20 new portfolio pieces. If you thought it was four times as hard to do the larger product, you're probably mistake. It's more like 10 times as hard.

Step 3: Divide those hours by the number of hours you think you can manage to work on your goal per week. Keep in mind your day job (if you have one), vacations, weddings, sleep, your friends, family, and dates, your soccer team, etc.

Step 4: Divide that number by 50. Give yourself two weeks of a break. If not for sustainability, then for emergencies.

BAM. That's your realistic timeframe (in years) that it'll take you to achieve your goal assuming you're putting in the work and prioritizing your goal over most other things. We don't want to discourage you from following your dream, but we just want to let you know that your timeline in your head is probably unrealistic, and we don't want you to be disappointed when those deadlines come due and you haven't hit your mark there.

Since Monkey is very deadline oriented, he likes to set his crazy goal, then go back and set another "backup" deadline that is more realistic. He wants to be a Magic:the Gathering illustrator by January of 2013, but realistically? It's more like January of 2015. He's going to bust his little tail to make the first deadline happen, but after doing some research, art directors (specifically those at Wizards of the Coast) say that it usually takes about 2.5 years from when you start trying to go pro to make it to that caliber of an illustrator. Work like you'll do it in half the time, expect longer, and hopefully you'll end up ahead of the curve.

Set your goals today, whether it's looking for a new job, a specific achievement, or your end-all dream. Just make sure that they're realistic and true to you.

Upgrade Yourself

There is nothing wrong with being ignorant.

Let us repeat that: there is nothing wrong with being ignorant. Whether you're ignorant about the difference between a 401k and a Roth IRA or why they are important, or whether you're ignorant about what the big psychological hurdle standing in your way of greatness is, it's okay.

We don't know about you, but often it feels like self-help books, or online courses, or going back to school when you're forty (or thirty, or twenty five, or anytime you're not 18) is some sort of character flaw. The rational is that you were too dumb/poor/incompetent/drugged up/whatever to learn whatever it is you were supposed to learn the first time.

This rational is one of the biggest crappy things that you can listen to. Seriously, this line of thinking will prevent you from learning and growing and really taking kick-ass control of your life.

Think about it this way: You grow up being told what to learn. You get tested on it, you learn it (short term, long term, whatever to pass), and then move on to new stuff. You graduate high school. College (if any) ends up being a big experimentation of you finding what you want to learn, but there's still a structure that helps feed you into different classes. There are prereqs, degree programs, a bunch of stuff that basically tells you what to learn. While you're busy trying to figure out which one of these is the best for you, you only have so much time and so much money to figure something out. So you rush, and panic, and maybe you don't get to try everything. You're too busy learning about astrophysics to learn how to market yourself and network, or maybe you're learning how to network but you don't have the time to learn how to replace your car engine or play the trumpet. Just because you learned a bunch of stuff doesn't mean you learned the stuff that you need or want to have learned.

Our point is that there is nothing wrong with being ignorant. We simply do not have the time to learn everything all at once, so logically there is going to be tons of stuff in our adult lives that we don't know very much about. However, there is something we can do about that.

One financial badass Monkey reads a lot from (Ramit Sethi, a true monster of a knowledge seeker) invests thousands of dollars in himself every year in courses, books, conferences, etc. etc. etc. The thing is, it's not just Ramit that invests in himself, it's basically every successful person. Some might try and hide the fact so they look "cooler," but regardless, successful people aren't afraid of doing what it takes to learn what they need to. Granted, you don't have to drop thousands of dollars, but you do have to take a lesson away from this - you need to invest in yourself.

Go to the self-help section in the library if you're feeling stuck in your art. Check out a book on finances if you have no idea how to deal with your money. Watch some online tutorials on how to build a silkscreen exposure unit or how to change your own oil. Take a class on archery, or on any topic that interests you at your local city college. Some classes are even free!

You see, if you're ignorant about something, educate yourself. In reality, we think that people at the top of their game will look down on us for trying to learn more and make ourselves stronger. The people who look down on us for reading self-help books when we know we have a problem or for spending hours reading coursework that will help us market ourselves better are really just envious and scared. They probably don't even know it, but deep down the reason why they feel the need to be all high-and-mighty is that they are afraid that you're going to surpass them.

In the end, who is the bigger fool? Someone with a problem who just ignores it and compounds the issue because they think they're above getting help, or someone with a problem who learns about it and figures out the way to overcome that problem?

Your Lazy Friend Bob

We all have that friend who, when it comes to creating, is "lazy." They mope around complaining about this or that, how the stars aren't aligned right to paint or how they just have to finish watching this TV show before they can sit down to write. Your friend also probably complains about not having enough time to create, even though they're on FB or twitter constantly clicking their digital crops or fighting the undead or resharing inspirational quotes/petitions/photos with black frames and white text underneath.

Your friend probably even knows that they're not getting enough work done. Frankly, it's almost certain when pressed, they'll lament their own perceived laziness. They obviously want to create, but they are just locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle to the death with their laziness.

Fret not, intrepid readers, as there is hope for your friend. The thing that you have to realize is that your friend isn't lazy. What we most often regard of as laziness is actually fear. Yes, fear, our constant frenemy that helps to keep us from walking into a bear cave, yet plagues us when we want to do our creative work.

You see, laziness is the cover, fear's camouflage, if you will. What is known as laziness is really symptoms and actions of self-preservation. Whether its the fear that your creation won't be up to par, or the fear that it will be, or the fear that it'll shock and offend, or the fear that no one will notice it, when you are so scared of the pain of confronting your fear, you stall. However your friend does this, they're stalling for tine to get out of having to face that pain. Pain hurts. Whether its this ball of twisting anxiety in your chest (like it is for Monkey), or a clenching in your stomach or that kink in your neck, the anxiety towards creating can be very real and uncomfortable. However, you can only confront our so-called "laziness" by confronting this pain and fear.

A technique that we like is called the "What are you afraid of? Why is that a problem?" game (super thoughtful title, we know). Whenever your friend is experiencing that fear of creating, ask them (or have them ask them self) " What are you afraid of?" Once they respond, the next question becomes "Why is that a problem?" To their response, ask again, "Why is that a problem?" You keep repeating this question again and again until they realize how their fears are usually conjured up to be something terrible when in reality it's not so bad. And if their fears do stem from something traumatic, then you at least know what you're dealing with.

An example. Bob wants to paint, but is "too lazy" to get out his paint set-up. "What are you afraid of, Bob?"

"I might have to do work and get all my crap together to paint."

"Why is that a problem?"

"It's hard work."

"Why is that a problem?"

"I don't like hard work."

"Why is that a problem?"

"It makes me get up and do something."

"Why is that a problem?"

"If I get up and do work, and it ends up sucking, I'd hate it."

"Why is that a problem?"

"It would suck. I'd hate the idea that I wasted some time."

"Why is that a problem?"

"Because if it sucks, then it'll prove that I'm a terrible frickin' artist."

Oh will it now? Bob just realized that in the end, it is not about laziness like he thought. It's not laziness at all, but in fact a deeply-hidden insecurity. To work past this issue, it's not so much dealing with helping Bob get off the couch, but actually dealing with the fact that Bob is afraid of work that doesn't live up to his expectations will "prove" that he is a bad artist. What Bob needs to do is let himself make bad art on purpose to show himself that everything he creates does not have to be a masterpiece. He needs to let go and find what makes art fun again so that he won't be afraid to create those masterpieces that he so obviously longs for.

While your own friend's experience might not be the exact same issue, it's worth it to sit down with yourself and do this exercise in the privacy of your own home. Ask the questions and answer it out loud. Do it in the shower if you need some privacy. It really helps a lot to determine what the real issues are so you can start combating them directly and get back to what you're meant to do: creating.

Why Monkey Hates Work

Monkey here today. Over the past few weeks, I've actually been having a bunch of what seem like emotional breakthroughs, so instead of try to be all preachy preachy, here's a look/call to arms about one of the things that I've been working on.

In order to get where I'm coming from, you'll need a bit of backstory.

Growing up, a lot of things came easily to me. This isn't just to brag, it's just how it was. I was home schooled until 4th grade, and when I entered public school, while I was really scared I'd be really behind the other kids, I found that I caught up and surpassed most of my classmates. On my first standardized test, I was in the 99th percentile for my age for most of the categories, and only in one subject was I below the 80th percentile. I was quickly pulled from my neighborhood school and put into a gifted program, where I continued to excel academically. To be perfectly honest, school was hella easy for me.

I know now how the school system in America biases certain intelligences and downplays others, and for whatever reason I was lucky to be gifted in the intelligences that schools promote. Thus, I coasted through elementary school, jr. high, and high school easily. Other students would study for a week for certain tests that I would study for the night before, and I'd still score higher. However, the ease at which academics came to me set me up for unrealistic expectations of myself.

When you get straight A's, constantly, there's not much higher you can go. Eventually my success in school became sort of business-as-usual, and my parents pretty much stopped checking my report cards after a while. High academic success was really just the normal routine.

At the same time, in junior high, I had friends who were even smarter than I was. They tried even less than I did, and would be the type to ace the SAT's on their first try. If I was above-average, they were genius-level.

Growing up in this environment did two things for me. First, it taught me that genius exists, and that I sort of was one, but not quite. Second, I was taught that the amount of work one puts into something is completely unrelated to your success.

Looking back, maybe the friends who were "smarter" than I was really just did a great job of hiding their studying. Maybe they were just naturally attuned to math and sciences. Who knows. Regardless, I've been living with an extremely high resistance to doing the work. As much as I talk about it here on the blog, it's mainly me trying to figure out my own head and to try new tactics that'll help me do my own work.

I just recently realized that the reason why I hate just sitting down and painting and would rather come up with some new complex money-generating plan is that my achievements for a good portion of my life had no correlation to the work I put into them. Things that came easily for me were celebrated, and when I tried really hard at something I wasn't naturally good at (something like, say, water polo), because the results weren't there, no one was there to celebrate my efforts.

Thus, every day I deal with a huge amount of guilt and self-hatred centered around my work. I compare myself to people who have been painting for 40 years, not other people who have been painting for 5. I compare my achievements to where I want to be when I'm 90, not to where I would want to be when I'm almost 30. Thus, the disparity of what I see when I finish a piece and what I want to see is like comparing a person who has never taken cooking lessons to a master chef (I do that comparison too).

When everything you do looks like a failure, you would want to run away too. Thus, the constant periods of facebook games, the busywork that should really wait until after the painting is done, the focus on business and marketing when I should really just be making more art. Sigh.

I hate doing the work, and often wish that everything was just handed to me. But I also know how hollow that feels, and really what I'm looking for is to be recognized for trying. Life is hard, and I, just like everyone, just wants to be recognized for what one was able to do. We're a generation that was told that we could do whatever we wanted if we put our minds to it, but we're graduating with huge piles of debt, are still lost at what we want in life, and are often set adrift in a less-than-ideal job hunting situation. No wonder so many of us are discouraged.

For me, figuring out the reason why I hate doing the work was really insightful, and doing things like recording all the stuff I do every day has really helped. As new-agey as it sounds (and probably is), repeating affirmations that "My work matters," has helped a lot as well. I still hate doing the work, but I'm finding that the pain that prevents me from actually creating something is slowly subsiding. I'm finding that I have more and more agency over when I do what (ie shut off the Facebook).

So whether you choose to do the scary thing of expose your own weird traumas and issues publicly like me, or choose to do the equally scary thing of confront your fears in the privacy of your own home/head, it really is something you need to do.

If you can relate at all to the feelings of regret, betrayal, loss, anger, and all the other crap that gets drudged up when you are trying to create, I can only urge you to bite your lip and plant your feet; look your fear in the eye, clench your fists and ask "why?" The answer might surprise you. And if you, like I did, feel guilty about your trauma (I didn't write about this for a long time since I thought people would think "oh, poor little smart boy is crying that he's not genius enough"), smash that thought. It's your life, and no one besides you has any right to tell you what is or isn't traumatic.

Take your life by the reigns and shake your fear until it's beady little eyes spin - you're not going to let it rule your life anymore, and this is your first step in taking back what is rightfully so. My work matters, and so does yours, and yours, and yours, and no one can stop us now.

Monkey + Seal Closing Down Shop?

While the last thing Monkey + Seal want to do is close down shop, if the upcoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) pass in the upcoming congressional votes, we may have to.

So if you haven't heard about SOPA or PIPA, they're basically congressional bills that in theory, are made to stop online piracy. While this idea in itself is great (especially for small business owners and artists like Monkey + Seal), the bills themselves are inherently flawed. A much better article on why they're bad pieces of legislature is HERE.

However, most articles focus more on why SOPA and PIPA will take down free speech (very important), destroy stuff we love like YouTube and wreck our economy (all stuff that is very likely to happen if these bills pass). Since all those points are better discussed elsewhere by people who are also very smart and know what they're talking about, today we wanted to talk to you about the reason why content providers (also known as us artists) need to take a stand against SOPA and PIPA.

Good work will be stifled. Under the combined might of SOPA and PIPA, websites can be taken down simply by being accused of infringing on copyright. While you think this would be cool (hey, if someone steals you new illustration, shut 'em down!), this can easily get out of hand. Say, for example, you decide to post a process photo of your new character design. One of the many staff illustrators/artists/designers for big firms that like to steal from smaller designers comes across it and shows it to their boss. Instead of paying you for your design, they decide to just steal your design, post it on their blog, and then tell your Internet Service Provider (ISP) that you're stealing their design. They don't have to prove anything, they just have to claim that you're doing it, even if they're stealing from you.

Sorta ridiculous and paranoid, but since you, as a small business, don't have the time/money/resources to take them to court and battle this out, who wins? Not you. Artists will be scared to produce good work (or at least scared to post things online), and the big pirates of industry win.

Collateral damage will be high even to artists who create original work. So say your favorite small business like Monkey + Seal does their standard original illustration for their blog post. However, another artist comes across it and says "Hmm, that sorta looks like this one illustration I did years ago. Those bastards are stealing from me!" They contact our ISP and get us shut down. Huh? What? We had no idea that our illustration looked like someone else's. We didn't copy, but because it resembled something else someone else had created, we suddenly got the boot before we even knew what would happen. Assuming we clear things up and our hosting gets turned back on, are we really going to keep on posting illustrations and blogging? Imagine if your business got shut down suddenly and you're being accused of copyright infringement. You have hundreds of images, and you're not even sure what you're being accused of doing.

Budding artists will be discouraged from making art. While it's not cool to copy other artists, think about all the budding artists who make fan art. Sure, they're technically infringing someone else's copyright, but if some 8-year old makes a Naruto drawing and posts it on their blog, do they really need to be shut down? Fan art, we'd argue, if anything makes the original property even more valuable and sought-after. It's one thing to be selling portraits of Pokemon and the like, but think about all the sites like Deviant Art and such who will easily be shut down because some kid with a box of color pencils and a scanner loves Batman too much? Think about all the venues that kids and students use to share art with each other. To be honest, most of those kids are using infringing material, but as long as they aren't selling it, who cares? Hell, if we ever got people doing Monkey + Seal fan art we'd be super happy (hint hint, everyone). The point is, many venues that are utilized especially by younger artists will be shut down, and that stinks.

In our mind, SOPA and PIPA is sort of a stick of dynamite response when a scalpel is what is needed. While they have terrible repercussions in terms of life in general, as artists, they are exceptionally scary. Frankly, we don't want to have to live in fear of creating, and having our youth grow up in a hyper-paranoid world where our art becomes even more censored and feared than it already is. Join us by going HERE and signing the petition to stop these bills from passing.

PS - for possibly the best take on this from a creator that Monkey has seen, go HERE